>Jonathan Stone writes:
>> Here's a suggestion to avoid these problems: Change disklabel's idea
>> of the `source of truth' to be the MBR, not the operator.

>The one problem is this: brand new disks have no MBR.

Yup. That's why I suggested special-casing an empty MBR.
Specifically, that we make absolutely sure we only install onto the
entire disk if there are no primary MBR partitions.

Make the user *write* an MBR, via fdisk, instead of letting disklabel
guess one (and getting it wrong, for far too many users).

If the disk already has an MBR, and the user wants a dedicated-disk
install, then the user can use fdisk to zero out all four primary MBR
partitions, and start again from there.  If disklabel can get the BIOS
geometry of a brand-new disk from the BIOS and put it in an initial
MBR, then so can fdisk.  If it can't, the user should be setting
it via fdisk anyway.

Where's the problem with this?


The part about building better fake disklabels is just an aid for the
installer; you can always override it via disklabel -e or other means.